them for that purpose, intimating thereby that I was not such.

The want of formality or rudeness was, probably, my not having addressed the paper to them with their assumed titles of True and Absolute Proprietaries of the Province of Pennsylvania, which I omitted as not thinking it necessary in a paper, the intention of which was only to reduce to a certainty by writing, what in conversation I had delivered viva voce.1

But during this delay, the Assembly having prevailed with Governor Denny to pass an act taxing the proprietary estate in common with the estates of the people, which was the grand point in dispute, they omitted answering the message.

When this act however came over, the proprietaries, counseled by Paris, determined to oppose its receiving the royal assent. Accordingly they petitioned the king in Council, and a hearing was appointed in which two lawyers were employed by them against the act, and two by me in support of it. They alleged that the act was intended to load the proprietary estate in order to spare those of the people, and that if it were suffered to continue in force, and the proprietaries, who were in odium with the people, left to their mercy in proportioning the taxes, they would inevitably be ruined. We replied that the act had no such intention, and would have no such effect; that the assessors were honest and discreet men under an oath to assess fairly and equitably, and that any advantage each of them might expect in lessening his own tax by augmenting that of the proprietaries was too trifling to induce them to perjure themselves. This is the purport

1 Viva voce: by word of mouth, orally.

of what I remember as urged by both sides, except that we insisted strongly on the mischievous consequences that must attend a repeal, for that the money, £100,000, being printed1 and given to the king's use, expended in his service, and now spread among the people, the repeal would strike it dead in their hands to the ruin of many, and the total discouragement of future grants: and the selfishness of the proprietors in soliciting such a general catastrophe, merely from a groundless fear of their estate being taxed too highly, was insisted on in the strongest terms. On this, Lord Mansfield, one of the counsel, rose, and beckoning me took me into the clerk's chamber, while the lawyers were pleading, and asked me if I was really of opinion that no injury would be done the proprietary estate in the execution of the act. I said certainly. "Then," says he, "you can have little objection to enter into an engagement to assure that point." I answered, "None at all." He then called in Paris, and after some discourse, his lordship's proposition was accepted on both sides; a paper to the purpose was drawn up by the Clerk of the Council, which I signed with Mr. Charles, who was also an Agent of the Province for their ordinary affairs, when Lord Mansfield returned to the Council Chamber, where finally the law was allowed to pass. Some changes were however recommended and we also engaged they should be made by a subsequent law, but the Assembly did not think them necessary; for one year's tax having been levied by the act before the order of Council arrived, they appointed a committee to examine the proceedings of the assessors, and on this committee they put several particular friends

1 Printed: this was paper money issued by the colony of Pennsylvania and based on the taxation of land.

of the proprietaries. After a full enquiry, they unanimously signed a report that they found the tax had been assessed with perfect equity.

The Assembly looked upon my entering into the first part of the engagement, as an essential service to the Province, since it secured the credit of the paper money then spread over all the country. They gave me their thanks in form when I returned. But the proprietaries

were enraged at Governor Denny for having passed the act, and turned him out with threats of suing him for breach of instructions which he had given bond to observe. He, however, having done it at the instance of the General,1 and for His Majesty's service, and having some powerful interest at court, despised the threats and they were never put in execution.

1 The General: probably the Attorney-General of Great Britain.

PART SECOND.1

§ 14. Franklin's First Mission to England, 1757-1762.

`RANKLIN, it will be remembered, says that he went

FRA

to England to present and support the petition of the legislature of Pennsylvania against the policy of the proprietaries of the colony, who persisted in refusing to permit their estates to be taxed.2

This appeal to the king had been forced upon the legislature by the exigencies of the French and Indian War. The vital question then was whether France or England should obtain possession of the New World. These two great rival powers now stood face to face engaged in a desperate contest for the mastery. On the one hand, the English colonists already possessed the greater part of the Atlantic coast; on the other, the French held Canada and claimed besides the whole country watered by the Mississippi and its tributaries in other words, the greater part of what now constitutes the United States. To de

1 Franklin abruptly ends his account of his life in 1757. The continuation of his biography, from this point until his death in 1790, is based on his writings and on the histories of the period.-D. H. M.

2 This was the chief grievance, though by no means the only one.

8 The French called this region Louisiana in honor of Louis XIV. of France. In 1762 they ceded all that portion of it which lay west of the Mississippi, together with New Orleans, to Spain. Thenceforth the name Louisiana was confined to that section of country-it extended northward from the Gulf of

fend this vast region from all settlers except those of their own nationality, the French built and garrisoned a chain of sixty or more forts extending from Quebec to New Orleans.1 Later, they began a second chain stretching southward from what is now Erie to the point since named Pittsburgh, in order to prevent English emigrants from settling in the Ohio valley. It was resistance to these preposterous and exclusive claims of France which brought on the The English colonists found that they must either fight or tamely submit to be cooped in between the mountain ranges of the Alleghanies and the sea, with the further prospect of being eventually driven out even from that narrow strip of territory. Washington, then a young man of twenty-two, had struck the first blow against the French occupation of the valley of the Ohio, but was overpowered by superior numbers and forced to surrender.

war.

Great Britain now saw that half-way measures would accomplish nothing, and made ready to fight in earnest. It was high time she did, for the struggle had at last actually begun which was to decide whether America should become a French province or should belong to that English-speaking race which first set foot on the continent,2 first permanently settled its soil, and was now fast peo

Mexico to the Lake of the Woods in British America, and thence west to the Pacific. Later, Spain ceded this territory back to France; and France sold it in 1803 to the United States.

1 This line of forts may be traced to-day by the cities of Quebec, Montreal, Ogdensburgh, Detroit, Toledo, Fort Wayne, Vincennes, Natchez, and New Orleans.

2 John and Sebastian Cabot, mariners of Bristol, England, the latter being, as it is believed, a native of that city, first discovered the mainland of North America in 1497- a year before Columbus landed on the South American continent; though he had visited the West Indies in 1492.

3 Though both the French and the Spanish had made earlier settlements